← Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Gaetz and Gabbard and R.F.K. Jr. — Oh, My!
00:34:53
As nominees roll in, the reality of Donald Trump’s second administration is rapidly coming into focus. This week, Ross is joined by Opinion columnist David French to discuss the surprising picks and what they signal about the incoming president’s policy shifts this time around.
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- [00:27]
David French
Wait, do I have to laugh if it's not funny?
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Ross Douthat
You don't have to laugh. No.
- [00:32]
David French
Okay.
- [00:32]
Ross Douthat
This is not some, like, Stalinist dictatorship. This is not Mar A Lago. Express your true opinions. From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Matter of Opinion. I'm joined this week by my colleague and fellow columnist David French. Hey, David.
- [01:03]
David French
Ross, it's great to be with you.
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Ross Douthat
I'm so glad you could be with me because this is kind of a funny situation. We actually. Yes, you can laugh.
- [01:12]
David French
Yeah, no, I'm already laughing, Ross. I'm already laughing.
- [01:15]
Ross Douthat
God laughs at all podcasting plans. And so apparently does Donald Trump, because we actually taped an entire Matter of Opinion episode earlier this week talking about what a second Trump administration might look like, with a lot of discussion of what was then a rush of White House cabinet appointments and nominations. But then, no sooner had we finished taping the episode than President Elect Trump announced two more really big ones. Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, and former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence. And we thought we had to talk about this. And unfortunately, Carlos and Michell are, you know, have escaped to a beach somewhere, I assume. So I was left alone. But I knew I could count on you, David, with your law and foreign policy background and your deep devotion to Matt Gaetz to talk about these picks in particular and what they say about how Trump intends to govern. So that's what we're gonna talk about.
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David French
Well, I'm always warming up in the bullpen, Ross.
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Ross Douthat
That's right.
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David French
You just have to give the sign.
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Ross Douthat
You'Re the Dan Quisenberry of. Of Trump era podcasting. Okay, that was a deep cut for our Kansas City audience. Hi, Kansas City.
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David French
I appreciate it.
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Ross Douthat
Yep. So. And one final note. We are taping Thursday afternoon. This episode, God willing, through the ministrations of our harried producers, will be out Friday morning. But God knows what will happen in the next five hours. So we apologize for any news we've missed. So let's start with the Gates appointment. David. He is notable unsurprisingly for Attorney General pick for being one of Donald Trump's allies and fierce defenders. Is there anything else you would say that he's known for?
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David French
Well, yeah, you would say that he is known for being investigated for allegedly having sexual relations with an underage girl. He is known for allegedly speaking quite openly and proudly about his sexual exploits, including allegedly showing pictures of women that he slept with, nude pictures to colleagues. He is definitely also known for disrupting the House rather dramatically when he initiated the coup that toppled the House speaker after the 2022 midterms, when ultimately leading to Mike Johnson being the current speaker of the House. And I guess the best way to describe him, Ross, is that he is a purely pugilistic political figure and a extraordinarily libertine personal figure who, by the way, has barely any legal experience at all. Let's just throw that in there.
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Ross Douthat
He has a law degree, which is more than I have, right?
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David French
Yes. Came out of law school, practiced for around two years before he then entered the Florida legislature. So he may be one of the least qualified attorney general nominees ever, just on the basis of his experience or lack thereof. In addition to these other things that I talked about.
- [04:28]
Ross Douthat
Yes, yes. The other things are notable.
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David French
Bad, Gross?
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Ross Douthat
Yes. No, no. He's. I think it's fair to say that he's known for being a gross figure. There is a House Ethics investigation involving him, which the House Ethics Committee was set to vote on Friday on whether to release their report. But now that release is suspended because Gates has resigned from the House, which has led to various complicated theories about how he isn't really trying to be Attorney general, that this was some sort of favor from Trump to him that let him leave the House to set himself up for his next political act. But that sort of six dimensional chess theory runs aground on, you know, a certain amount of reporting just in the last 24 hours from people saying, no, look, you know, obviously it's an open question whether he can be confirmed, but Trump definitely wants him to be confirmed. And that reporting includes a, I think, a particularly striking quote from Mark Caputo, a Floridian reporter who now reports for the Bulwark. He had a quote, basically from a Trump adviser, an anonymous quote, saying none of the other candidates, none of the attorneys had what Trump wants. And they didn't talk like Gates, the adviser said everyone else looked at AG as if they were applying for a judicial appointment. They talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional bullshit, pardon my language. Gates was the only one who said, yeah, I'll go over there and start cutting F word deleted heads. So clearly that's what Donald Trump wants from this appointment. What do you think is going to happen next?
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David French
That's a great question, Ross, because it's very clear from some of the early reporting that a number of Sen. Are, shall we say, skeptical of this appointment. But there is also another factor looming in the background which is, okay, wait a minute, if it's not Matt Gaetz, who is it? Is it Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who's under investigation himself? So there is a lot of concern that what this pick is, is a signal of this is the kind of person Trump wants as an attorney general pick and he's just going to keep volleying up to us the same kind person. However, if the Senate is going to exercise a true advice and consent, not just consent, but advise and consent role here, it should be able to stand up and say this person is grotesquely unqualified. We need to see the American people need to see this House ethics report before there's a single vote in the Senate. But I, you know, Ross, this is a going to be a big test for Senate Republicans. The question is how much are they going to view themselves as Team Trump versus how much are they going to adopt the role envisioned for them in the process by the founders as an independent check on Trump? And that's the question. And right now I'm not that optimistic that they're going to act as a check as opposed to act as team members. And so the other thing that I want to mention about him, just real briefly, there's no indication from Matt Gaetz's career that he is just even competent enough to run an organization like this. One of the reasons the American people are so negative about American institutions is because of a sheer lack of competence that is consistently displayed in American institutions. And the last name that I would think of to say, right the ship on a massive complex organization to just make it competent and good at its job. That last name that comes to my mind is Matt Gates.
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Ross Douthat
Yeah. So let me put a couple points to you on those questions. So I agree that Gates has no, as far as I can tell, relevant managerial experience that would be relevant to running the Department of Justice. I do think that Gates is smart. I think that he is a sort of savvy, tactical politician who is sort of different categorically in certain ways from some of his sort of MAGA esque allies in the House. I think he has more savvy and more sense of what he's actually doing for better or worse. I do think he has somewhat of a kind of principled issue profile. Interestingly, that is kind of, you know, he is a libertine, obviously, and it's sort of a libertarian issue profile. He's a libertarian in his voting record on everything from drug policy to surveillance, these kind of things. It's sort of an interesting mix. So I just wanted to mention those two things because they are, I think, part of the Gates package and relevant to sort of thinking about what he might be thinking here. But then I think from the start, from the point of view of people worried about abuses of power in a second Trump term, the Attorney General office has obviously been kind of a reasonable locus of anxiety, right? Like, yes, Trump campaigned on the premise that the Department of Justice was politicized and weaponized against him and, and that he was going to sort of act against it, that there would be purges and heads would roll and so on, with the sort of further implication, I think, that a lot of people drew, that the DOJ would be used against his political enemies as he felt it was used against him. Now, if that is your major concern about what might happen with the doj, obviously there is a sort of high minded institutionalist case that Matt Gaetz should not be Attorney General. I do wonder, though, maybe I'm being perverse here, but I do wonder if that is your worry in a way, are you maybe not better off with a sort of lightning rod, performative showman bound really tightly to Trump without significant institutional experience in that role, as opposed to a more conventional figure who we can assume could only get the job if he'd promised certain things to Trump, but might actually be a little bit more effective at using the DOJ inappropriately for Trump's ends. Like, can you see sort of from a point of view of not wanting a successfully politicized doj? I can almost see a case for just like, yeah, this is the kind of person Trump is sending up. He campaigned on this. Let's see how it goes.
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David French
So in other words, the incompetence is a feature, not a bug incompetence, but.
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Ross Douthat
Also like there is no sort of tissue of, you know, neutrality around Gates. Right? You, I mean, there's always a certain illusion around the neutrality of the doj. Attorney Generals are always, to some extent, creatures of the presidency. Janet Reno was not actually independent of Bill Clinton and so on. Right? So, so Trump wants to go further, even maybe than, you know, the President's brother as Attorney general era that the Kennedys gave us. Right. He wants a true creature. Okay. Don't you want that to be sort of naked and overt so that the public can judge it fully rather than, again, someone who's draping it in some kind of constitutional theorizing?
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David French
Ross, you're getting to, I think, which is going to be one of the key questions of the Trump administration, which is how much should people try to throw their bodies in front of, obviously terrible decisions? And so you had 2017, 2018, 2019. You had a culture in the White House and in the larger government where people were throwing their bodies in front of what they viewed to be impulsive or catastrophic or terrible Trump decisions. And then by 2020, a lot of those people had been kind of cleared out. And then you're beginning to get a lot of the same kind of conversation now. Okay, should the Senate just go ahead and confirm him so that the American people can see what the Trump vision is for the doj? Isn't that what they should do? Should they stop throwing their bodies in front of bad decisions? And my bias is you throw your body in front of the bad decision because the bad decision can have terrible consequences. The counterargument to that is, well, it's the consequences of the bad decision that move us through this moment. I don't know that there's a perfect answer to that, but I do think wherever the line is of when the Senate should say Trump gets his way versus we're going to assert our independent judgment, wherever that line is, it's far removed from this guy, from Matt Gaetz. This is the kind of pick that I don't even know why the Senate has an advising role if it's just gonna roll over for this person.
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Ross Douthat
Right. And one of the things, I mean, you've had a lot of commentary on this from people saying Trump is, you know, he's owning the libs. It started. The lib owning has begun. And in the case of Gaetz, as far as I can tell, the people being owned are all of the Republicans who hate him. Yeah, liberals obviously don't like Matt Gaetz, but I think he's more of a kind of hate figure inside the Republican caucus than he is like on msnbc. I think right now you have Trump is giving Senate Republicans, in an odd way, an out. Right. Like John Cornyn. I think just before we recorded this, said something to the effect of, well, we need to see, at least see what's in the ethics report. Right. So they may not. I think it's totally possible. Gates gets confirmed, but they can just reject him and say, we're protecting President Trump from g his own bad character.
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David French
Right.
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Ross Douthat
So that may be where this goes, which again leaves open the underlying question of how beholden an AG should be to the president. All right, speaking of areas where Trump appointees have tended to, if not throw their bodies in front of the president, at least steer the president in the past. When we come back, we're going to talk first about the Tulsi Gabbard appointment, but more generally about the array of foreign policy picks Trump has made and what they tell us. So stay with us. We'll be right back.
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Ross Douthat
And we're back. So we're going to turn from President elect Trump's attorney general pick to his foreign policy pick along with Matt Gaetz for attorney general, the big pick at the same time was former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence. I think clearly a kind of gesture to what you might call the, you know, anti CIA wing of the Republican Party. Also sort of anti interventionist, paleo conservative, isolationist. You can choose your term. Gabbard is only one of a number of foreign policy picks that Trump has made, and these include Marco Rubio for Secretary of State, Florida Representative Mike Waltz for national security adviser, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik for UN Ambassador, and maybe most notably, in terms of it being a Trumpian surprise, the Fox News host and combat veteran Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense. Right so, David, before the Hegseth pick, certainly, and before the Gabbard pick as well, the foreign policy pick struck me as essentially a reprise of Trump's first term, where what he did in foreign policy was not pick figures associated with Trumpian populism directly. Obviously, all of the figures involved have adapted themselves to Trumpism, but they on foreign policy, Rubio, Waltz and Stefanik are all what I would refer to, and maybe you disagree, as kind of mainstream Republican foreign policy hawks. And in his first term, Trump basically worked his own kind of amoral realist calculations through a foreign policy team that was more conventional in its views. And it seems like that could be happening again. Now, Hegseth is a different case and Gabbard is a different case, but I wanted to give that reaction and see what you thought about it.
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David French
Yeah, I would agree with that. So I live in this neighborhood. My neighborhood is 85% Republican. So I'm living in a very, very red part of America. And so I talk to Trump supporters just all the time in course of my daily life. And what's really interesting is sort of seeing the dichotomy between MAGA and what you might call Normie Republican. And Normie Republican basically takes the view that the real Donald Trump is the Donald Trump of 2017, 2018, 2019. That's with Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State at the start, Mattis, McMaster Kelly, and they look back at that time and they're nostalgic for it. And so they looked at the 2024 election where Trump was saying pretty radical things about foreign policy, pretty radical things on a lot of fronts, and saying, he doesn't mean that. That's just Trump being Trump. That's Trump's bluster. And those folks who believe that looked at the pick of Rubio in particular Stefanik as well, and said, look, these are mainstream Republicans. This is not an unusual crazy out there administration. These are mainstream Republicans. And then you saw some consternation from maga, which had heard all the campaign rhetoric and said, oh, we want him to do all that. That's exactly what we want. So part of his coalition is voting for him, saying, nah, he's not going to do what he says. Another whole part of this coalition is voting for him and saying, yeah, we want him to do exactly what he says. And so I felt like the Rubio Stefanic picks were much more in line. That kind of normie Republican view of Trump, which is lots of bluster, but at the end of the day, he's still broadly a Republican. As we understand Republicans. And so I think the Rubio pick in particular amongst all of them sent that signal. And so it was a very interesting first of the big picks to come out. And then you saw it, Ross, I'm sure you saw it, that backlash on maga. What from maga? What are you doing with Rubio? And then here comes Gabbard, here comes Hegseth, which is. These are two very different picks from Rubio and Stefanik.
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Ross Douthat
Well, let's talk about what makes them different, because I feel like. So to me, Gabbard is ideologically different, like to the extent that she sort of belongs to the Republican Party now. She belongs to the, to the Ron Paul wing of the Republican Party, which is intensely anti interventionist, intensely skeptical of the national security state, and, you know, just fundamentally ideologically different from a Rubio. Hegseth, I think, is a more complicated case where he is a guy who sort of began his career as part of a group of veterans advocating in defense of the surge in Iraq. In the George W. Bush era, he ended up as a Fox News host and in affect has become sort of very aggressively populist, aggressively Trumpian. You know, if you look at things he said in the Trump era, he was more hawkish than Trump at some points on Iran and other things. I don't think he fits neatly into the kind of ideological category as Gabbard. I think it's more that he doesn't have normal foreign policy experience, is much more of sort of a tattooed TV figure with, you know, substantial military experience who, who, if I'm reading it, is there to sort of fight a culture war in the Pentagon, you know, against wokeness DEI initiatives. And I think that there are people in Trump's orbit who imagine that the US can honestly address its recruiting shortfalls if we have a sort of marshal figure with combat experience, a sort of tough guy figure as Secretary of Defense, which again is maybe a bad idea. It's quite different from Gabbard. But what do you think?
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David French
Yeah, well, let me start with Gabbard. I mean, when it comes to Gabbard, I see her in many ways as the worst pick than Hegseth. Gabbard isn't just a Ron Paulite figure. She's a Ron Paulite figure. If Ron Paul seemed to really have an affection for Assad in Syria and seemed to have some much more sympathies to sort of the Vladimir Putin view of international relations and international affairs, very hostile to Ukraine in a way that Marco Rubio, for example, never would be. But the way that Pete Hegseth has never shown. So I think when you're talking about Tulsi Gabbard, you're talking about somebody with a worldview about America's role in the world, a worldview about the defense establishment, a worldview that it's about as far from conventional Republican as you can imagine. It is extraordinarily different from conventional Republican. Hexathus is a different case. So, you know, I've seen a lot of opposition to him. None of that opposition should center around his military record. His military record is sterling. I mean, he served his country honorably. He served his country courageously. The critique that I have around him is similar to one of the critiques that I had around Matt Gaetz. Why are we giving the keys to these vast institutions to people who have no experience running virtually any kind of institution at all, for one thing? So, again, we're going to that competence point. You cannot equate ideology and competence. They're not the same thing. You can like someone's ideology, but if they don't have this record of accomplishment that indicates they're ready for this role. I mean, think about it this way. You know, if you are running a multinational corporation, you're running Boeing. Do you hire a CNBC host to run Boeing? If they've never run a company? That would be a dangerous move. That would be a dangerous hire. So I think here with Hegseth, what you're looking at is, yeah, he has an ideological view. I would put it as he's more like an avatar of Christian Maga. He has crusader tattoos, the Deus Volt tattoo. So he's a TV host. He's served bravely and honorably. But, Ross, I could tell you five, six guys I served with in Iraq who are far more qualified to be Sec. Def. Than he is.
- [24:27]
Ross Douthat
Right? No, I mean, he has done some policy work, worked for veterans organizations, was sort of touted briefly in the first term as a potential secretary for Veterans Affairs. So he's not without some, let's say, sort of interest in military policy. But, yes, he has no relevant executive experience. And I mean, at a moment when the Pentagon, obviously, everyone on the rightward side of the political spectrum thinks, you know, the Pentagon needs to be shifted in various ways to meet the Chinese threat, to meet the multipolar world, you would have to imagine that he could only succeed if his undersecretaries were all amazing bureaucrats, basically. Right, Right, exactly. Which is not impossible, but does not seem especially likely to be the case. All right, I want to pull up from both of these questions and talk about what Generally we're learning about the Trump governing style so far, but we'll talk about that and finish up when we come back. Stay with us.
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Ross Douthat
And we're back. So we've talked about the attorney general pick, we've talked about the foreign policy picks. I want to just pull up. We're, you know, what, a week, a week and two days into the preamble to the second Trump administration. What can we say generally, David, about what we're seeing? Is this time different? Are we just doing four years of the same Trumpian style? What do you think?
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David French
Oh, it's beginning differently than it did last time. I mean, I Vividly remember in November 2016, moving into December 2016, one of the first things that you saw was Trump bringing in a parade of some of the most respected people in Republican politics, some of the most respected people in the military. He was bringing in a parade of people who had a calming effect on the American people. Not entirely, of course. We know it was a very chaotic time then, too.
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Ross Douthat
I don't remember being that calm, but sure, yeah, okay.
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David French
But I didn't know who Trump would nominate. And if you're going to nominate General Mattis, if you're going to nominate, I didn't love the Rex Tillerson pick, but he's a very serious person. So if you're going to nominate Mattis, Tillerson, McMaster, Kelly, these are all very, very serious people. And so from the get go, a Lot of the alarmism around Trump to a lot of Republicans was already seen as overblown because, look, does General Mattis work for a dangerous man? Does H.R. mcMaster? I mean, you could go down the list and then here what you're seeing is he's going ahead and just running straight to the 2020 chaotic Trump. He's just stampeding straight there. And so that 2020 chaotic Trump was surrounding himself with cranks and fringe figures. And that's exactly what he's doing with some, not all of these cabinet appointments. So what we're seeing is, as I said earlier, it's just the continuation of the 2020, 2021 lurch into what you might call more pure Trumpism.
- [29:16]
Ross Douthat
So I just want to, though, focus on what to me is sort of the difference. Right. You said some but not all of the picks. To me, it seems like by picking Matt Gaetz, Trump is telling us that he means to be sort of personally intensely invested in the Trumpification, whatever that may mean of the Department of Justice. And, you know, related things by picking Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz along with Tulsi Gabbard and Gabbard in an important, but a role that is not as historically important in setting foreign policy as Secretary of State. That says to me that on foreign policy there's less of a full Trumpian agenda that he's just going to push through. And it's more that he is, in effect, doing something similar to the first term. But he has a different coalition now and he's ensuring basically that he's got, you know, a group of conventional Republicans plus a representative of, we'll call it the like anti war. Right. For want of a better term in Gabbard plus whatever Hegseth is. But that seems to me quite different. And if you're looking for reassurance, I would rather get the full Trumpification in domestic policy than in foreign policy right now. And I don't think, you know, I think we would disagree slightly, maybe more than slightly. I don't think it's a bad thing to have a foreign policy team with someone with, you know, what you would consider somewhat fringe views in the room for debates. I would not want Gabbard as Secretary of State. But Gabbard in the room does not alarm me that much.
- [30:59]
David French
I will say that of the picks, I don't like the Gabbard pick at all. Utterly opposed to the Gabbard pick.
- [31:05]
Ross Douthat
Very, very anti David French pick. Yes.
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David French
Yeah, there's nothing about the Gabbard pick. There is nothing about her cozying up to Assad, there's nothing about her comments about Russia and Ukraine, nothing about that. I think that I am entirely in disagreement with that. But I will agree with you, she is less dangerous at where she is than if she was Secretary of State, for example, or Secretary of Defense. And I'm also going to agree with you that the full Trumpification of domestic policy is also less menacing than the full Trumpification of foreign policy, because there are multiple checks that you can impose on a president. Domestically, he has a much more free hand, much more free hand in foreign policy. And so that Trumpification domestically is much easier to oppose in concrete and specific ways compared to. If he wants to just cut off Ukraine, he can cut off Ukraine. He can just do that. And so I think that I'm going to agree with you on that.
- [32:07]
Ross Douthat
Yeah, I mean, to me, this looks like a foreign policy team that, like the last foreign policy team, he's going to make requests and they're going to end up presenting him with a bunch of different options that steer him in one direction or another. And my concern as someone who is, I think, you know, somewhat less hawkish than you or more concerned about American overstretch, is actually that this team, while it has in Gabbard, again, a sort of anti war figure, it lacks a kind of realist center, like someone who has a strategic vision of how America is going to rebalance itself in the world. Right now, I don't see that appointment. I see sort of more. I mean, maybe Rubio has ideas along those lines, but I see more sort of conventional. You know, we face our enemies wherever they are. Republican thinking. Plus, I mean, who knows? Who knows what Pete Hegseth will represent?
- [33:01]
David French
So can I. I know I'm a MOO guest and not a MOO host. Can I ask a MOO host a question?
- [33:07]
Ross Douthat
Yes.
- [33:08]
David French
Does JD Vance play a role in foreign policy? Do you see him as providing some sort of ballast on foreign policy in a Trump administration? What kind of portfolio do you see him having? Because he's obviously much less hawkish on Ukraine than I am, for example. Yes, but.
- [33:24]
Ross Douthat
Right.
- [33:25]
David French
How much of a role does he play in the Trump administration do you foresee?
- [33:29]
Ross Douthat
Honestly, I wish I could tell you that I can see through the veil and call up the future vice president and have him tell me, but I have no special insight. My sense from these picks would be that he is not exerting strong influence over foreign policy. I mean, he defined himself to me and that interview I did with him as a realist. I don't think he defines himself where Gabbard is, and I think he has a good relationship with Rubio in the Senate. But obviously they have differences on foreign policy. So I think the Vance role remains to be seen. But the one other thing about Vance is that we haven't seen a lot of economic policy appointments from Trump as yet. And you would expect Vance is sort of populist side to have potentially some influence on those. Certainly, I think the people who, for good or ill, were like, you know, well, Vance is gonna end up being the brains of this White House. I mean, we haven't even talked about Elon Musk and his role. But I would say that the real my, my takeaway at the moment, especially from the Gates pick and the Hegseth pick and the way that these picks are being made, sort of the way they seem like a surprise even to people on Trump's team, is the real continuity with the first term is there's no J.D. vance as the secret brain Elon Musk. This is Donald Trump's administration. Yes, there may be a J.D. vance administration someday, but this is, for now, just the Trump administration redux with all that that may entail. And on that note, I'm being handed a note. No, I'm not being handed a note because I don't have anyone here to hand me one. But I would be remiss if I did not mention that as we conclude this recording, there is breaking news and a Politico report that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Will indeed be put forward as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Another lightning rod, controversial Trump being Trump. Kind of pick that I wish we could talk about now, David, but, and.
- [35:31]
David French
Ross, I thought they couldn't get worse than Matt Gaetz.
- [35:38]
Ross Douthat
All right, well, that's, that's a strong statement. And I imagine that this show will have many more opportunities to talk about all of these characters and all of these issues. And I'm sure that we will have you back at some point soon to do so. So thank you again, David, for joining me in a pinch. And we'll talk again soon.
- [35:56]
David French
Thanks so much, Ross.
- [36:03]
Ross Douthat
Thanks so much for joining our conversation. Give Matter of Opinion a follow on your favorite podcast app and leave us a nice review while you're there to let other people know why they should listen. Do you have a question for us based on something we talked about today? We want to hear it, share it with us in a voicemail by calling 212-556-7440 and we might just respond to it in an upcoming episode. You can also email us@matterofopinionytimes.com Matter of opinion is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett and Andrea Betanzos. It's edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Carol Sabaro, Sonia herrero and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Carol Sabaro. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie Rose Strasser.
- [37:23]
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